A BRAND storyteller's P.O.V.

The question of whether lying can be an effective strategy in politics, business, and all human endeavor has never been more urgent than now. When lying succeeds, we're all in trouble. Liars win in totalitarian states where those in control solely define what's true and what's not. The little girl who says "the emperor has no clothes!" is immediately tossed into jail, though the naked emperor keeps on being naked despite the courtiers' praise for "the beautiful clothing" the emperor is wearing ("he isn't wearing anything" says the imprisoned little girl, far out of earshot).

Lying is also a signal that we're living in a place of low or no trust, where people feel no moral obligation to each other. As the ancient Romans put it, "caveat emptor" -- "the buyer must beware," because we assume the seller is lying about the goods and trying to fleece us. Nobody can protect you but you, and good luck in that world.

Lying doesn't happens in a vacuum -- it's important to know that lying is contextual, part of a deep-seated worldview that's fear-based, lacking in trust, and narcissistic. Great liars don't just lie, they lie within a framework they've helped create, one which facilitates more lying.

Whenever you see the following practices used, you should probably suspect that the person doing these things is a liar:

1. "Whataboutism." This is a classic tactic of liars, also called "changing the subject" or "muddying the waters" or "false equivalency." Put simply, liars will avoid accountability for their own wrongdoing by pointing to the wrongdoing of others. Whataboutism is about this: "Hey, look at the birdie over there!" The now-classic example involves a leader, perhaps a political leader, getting up every day and lying his keister off. When asked by the media to defend his latest outrage, this leader (or his spokespeople) might say "what about her emails" or "my opponents have done much, much worse." Does it work? Yes. Does it erode any and all sense of morality? Yes, because it kills accountability by letting everyone off the hook for bad behavior. "yes, so I stole your wallet, but what about Charles Manson?"

2. Attack the Messenger. Another classic diversion. When everybody is corrupt, there's nobody left to hold anyone accountable for anything. So if you tell me I'm lying, I'll explain why nobody should believe you (you stole a cookie in 3rd grade, right?). If I get arrested by the police for robbing a bank, the arresting officer has a personal animosity towards me. Or the police department is corrupt (CIA? FBI?). When news of my arrest breaks in the local Quincy newspaper, it's the same response. The newspaper has a personal animus against me, and journalists are losers anyway. Why should anyone believe "the failing Quincy Sun," a loser publication run by a small-town loser with a "so sad" circulation of 6,800 losers. The best way to deny the truth is to knock down anyone who stands up for truth. Liars win when nobody has the authority to call them out for lying. Yay!

3. Erode Trust in Institutions. Institutions have authority, but that authority is based on the trust given to those institutions. When you erode trust in institutions, by questioning the institution's integrity, leadership, mission, and values, you ultimately cause institutions to crumble. For example, local government can't function unless citizens believe in its integrity and reason-for-being. Once that belief disappears, it's every man, woman, and child for themselves. Does an intentional effort to erode trust in institutions serve liars? You betcha.

4. Erode the Concept of Objective Truth. Liars can get philosophical fast. If you tell 10-year-old Billy he did something wrong, don't be surprised if the budding philosopher/lawyer says (1) "I didn't know it was wrong, so how can I be held accountable and/or (2) what is "truth" anyway and why is the "law" the law, and who can say what "truth" is (not the lying, failing Quincy Sun). When you erode the whole framework of objective truth, liars win. Liars love to say "nobody has the right to tell me what's right and wrong" or "I was living MY truth, as defined by me alone." Narcissists can do NO wrong in their own minds, and therefore they must re-shape the world in a way that serves their narcissism, so they are always right.

5. Erode Our Trust in Each Other. When we're all isolated and afraid and willing to believe anything the liar says as long as we feel safe, the liar wins. The goal of liars is to have people turning on each other rather than to each other. As the ancient Romans said about controlling their many enemies, "divida et vinci" -- "divide and conquer." When everyone is bickering with everyone, when people feel isolated and alone, they simply lack the moral authority to call out the liar. So if the liar can sow division and suspicion and chaos, keeping people from creating any sense of community, the groundwork has been laid for more lying.

How do we counteract these efforts to attack the truth and those who would hold liars accountable for the truth? First, we need to be aware of their manipulations. Second, we need to call them out on these manipulative tactics. One of the biggest problems with the media, for example, is their LOVE of conflict. As divisions get sowed and deepened, the media get more excited because such conflict makes for great news. But great news is awful for the community.

We need to turn the media off and reach out to build community around basic values like mutual respect, fairness, integrity, and objective truth. Don't let the liar confuse you about what the liar is trying to do. Understand it and counteract it. The most urgent question we face as a nation today isn't, "is the liar really a liar?" (Yes, he is, in case you were wondering). The more urgent question is, "how do we re-build trust and a sense of community? We have to answer as individuals first, then as a (potential) community. Any answers, dear reader . . . share below.

We seem to be having a national nervous breakdown, which makes sense given the mixed moral messages we hear in the news every day. When I think of the causes of this national nervous breakdown, one is foremost: cognitive dissonance. This psychological term refers to the gap or misalignment between what we believe and what we see in the world. The classic example would be of a highly-moral person who gets tempted by money, status, and/or power to ignore her values. These moments of moral tension and internal conflict, which are now moments of external conflict and national moral tension, are the very definition of cognitive dissonance.

As people who are decent and have basic values (I mean you, dear reader), we want to “live out” our decency and basic values. When we don’t, cognitive dissonance sets in and we can be confused about our values and who we are. If this confusion and conflict go on too long, whether in our own brains or as a nation, a mental breakdown ensues.

Two Urgent Questions

Who are we as a nation? Who are we as individuals? To answer these urgent questions requires us to reflect upon, define, and align our values WITH our thoughts and actions. As a nation, and as individuals, we must go back to fundamental questions. Are we inclusive? Do we believe in fairness, not just for “people like me” but for “people not like me”? Do power and authority and “might” make right? Should we follow authority? Do we have moral responsibilities to others, for making the world better? Or am I the only one who really matters?

We are being trolled as a nation, and our basic values are being challenged (and trolled and contested) every single day. The goal of trolls? To confuse, to weaken, to undermine core beliefs so that moral relativism is the norm. If you are susceptible to trolling, then you need to sit down and reflect. You can strengthen your values by actually modelling them for others around you. For instance, don’t TALK about inclusion and respect for others; ACT in a way that shows you value inclusion and respect for others. You don’t need permission from the White House to live out your values, nor should your values be trolled from the White House either.

What I Believe and Why

I believe firmly in building community around caring and mentoring and empathizing and listening. These are my values because they sustain me; they keep me happy and healthy. Back in 2000 and again in 2014, I suffered a series of panic attacks caused by severe social anxiety. These panic attacks left me unable to sleep and unable to function at work or in my life. In the end, on both occasions, I was hospitalized for a short time. I’ve spent years of my life in therapy, trying to understand how to effectively manage my mental health. I used to do it with therapy and medication. Then I decided on another way. I realized a very simple secret which has become the key to my physical, mental, and spiritual health: the world can generally be trusted, and people can generally be trusted. Err on the side of trust, rather than isolation.

I don’t preach community just because it sustains personal and professional lives, although I know that community helps sustain personal and professional life. I preach community as a mental health imperative for myself and others. When we isolate ourselves from community, we can get lost in our own heads. Anxieties, resentments, and fears can grow, taking us to places that are unhealthy. I’ve been to those places.

What community does is teach us that we can (and must) choose trust, that we can seek help and we, in turn, can offer help. This goes for our personal lives, our careers, and our health. When we reach out to others, we’re given the chance to get help, to be better, and to also get better by helping others be better. This approach has helped me in every area of my life.

The Next Step: Act On What Matters

As a nation, we are awash in fear, anxiety, trolling, and resentment. These feelings serve the status quo because they keep us turning on each other rather than to each other. We can reduce our national and personal cognitive dissonance by talking to each other, especially with people who have been excluded and “othered.” Instead of being afraid and bunkered in, reach out and try to learn something, to trust someone. We are in a crisis of empathy. Get out, talk to people, work on improving your capacity to trust and empathize. Doing these things goes far beyond mental health; they will transform the world around you and, if scaled up, can morally transform the entire nation.

The best thing you can do for the nation right now is to think about the values you are willing to fight for, and then promote those values in what you say and what you do. Will doing so put you in the bullseye or crosshairs of “the status quo” or “conventional wisdom,” “the patriarchy,” “the power structure,” and “the man”? Yes. Do it anyway. The alternative? Cognitive dissonance and unhealthy “wobbliness” about your values. When we don’t talk about and live out what we believe, our values can disappear quickly, so can our sanity and our democracy.

Can the artistic be separated from the political? The answer is “no.” The very act of creativity is a challenge to the political status quo. Every artist is seeking to recreate the world. As a writer, I’m an advocate for the values I care deeply about: inclusion, health (mental and physical), fairness, empathy, psychological safety for all, and community. The personal vision and values of the creator are what gives art its urgency, intensity, and clarity. Art, if it's any good, challenges us to think anew. Nothing is more subversive.

Great art is a vision of the world as it is, contrasted with a vision of what the world might become. Art gives hope, reminds us of our better selves, inspires us. Even the brilliantly creative speech by Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream,” perfectly contrasts this nation as it is (racist, unfair, divided, standing proud in its rich history of intolerance) against a beautiful, 3-dimension imagined future King aspires to, one that is all about equal opportunity and inclusion, living up to our own national ideals as espoused in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

King’s speech is art because it sits in the now-widening gap between what we are and what we aspire to be. Art reminds us that we can be more, we can do more, we can transcend our own petty desires (I need to be rich, famous, beautiful, etc.) and cognitive limitations. Toni Morrison's epic novel "Beloved" would be a perfect antidote for anyone thinking America has ever been great for more than a privileged few.

The late, great comedian George Carlin was an artist too, and he agreed with King about the “reality” of the American Dream. “It’s a Dream,” quipped Carlin, “because you have to be asleep to actually believe it.” Sardonic, yes, but Carlin and King were two artists inhabiting that same gap between our bleak realities and our brilliant aspirations. Art reminds us of that gap and where we are within it.

If we don’t have hope or memory, we can easily lose sight of our deepest values in the tumult of the political moment. Each artist expresses a vision of the world that also encompasses their own values, how they believe the world should be. If you have no vision and values, you’re a zombie who has surrendered human agency and lost your soul (a status I refer to as “Sean Spicerdom”).

Since You Have Values, You're Political

You may be quiet and shy; you may be conflict-averse; you may avoid political discussions at all costs. But here’s the deal: if you have values that you believe in, that you would fight for at least on your own behalf if those values were offended, then you are political. Period.

My values drive me every day and I seek to express those values in new and creative ways each time I work. I try to be open and honest about where I'm coming from. The same is true for every writer and every artist. The writer or artist who believes they are not political, are above or “outside” politics, is in fact espousing a political view (one that supports the status quo, by the way).

What makes us political is our values as we express them, whether through the way we create or work, or in the way we live. I remember attending a "protect immigrants" march in Boston in 2017 (my mother was an immigrant), and seeing a sign that still inspires me: "They thought they could bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds." Perfect.

When you offer up your seat on a crowded subway train to an elderly person, when you help a friend who could use some advice, when you offer directions to a stranger who’s lost, or hire someone because they’re the most qualified candidate even when they don’t look like you (yes, that is possible and even, gasp, advisable), you are expressing your values. You’re also expressing them when you don’t offer up your seat, when you don’t help a friend, when you shun the stranger, when you hire someone because they “make me feel comfortable and look just like me” (yay, lack of diversity!).

We are all political, not just in the way we create but in the way we live each day and in every choice we make. Own it. You are political on election day, but you’re political every day when you vote with your choices. All action is political action.

There is no possibility of separating art and politics, but that doesn’t mean art needs to be a bunch of cheap campaign slogans. Art is how the artist sees the world, whether as it is or as it could be or both. Whether in my writing or in my life, I know that I need to be driven by my values. When I’m not, I produce lifeless work. When I care deeply, the writing works because it’s coming from a place of moral clarity and self-realization.

In an era when human decency, empathy, and respect for others are profoundly political (and hotly contested) values, we can’t pretend that our everyday choices aren’t political. Let us embrace the values we hold dear, and let us express our values in the way we create and the way we live our lives each day. Be you -- even when they bury you, be the seed that continues to grow. Make room for others because you might need room yourself. Build community around values. That is art, and it’s politics too.

You won't hear from me again until the first week of 2018. I'm taking a Holiday hiatus to reflect upon the year, my values and my business. No matter your religious faith (or agnostic), I think the holiday season is when values matter most, the time we should reflect upon whether we are embodying and living our values. The Biblical passage Matthew 25 helps me do that ('whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did also for me.’)

I was raised by a mother who was deeply religious, a devout Irish-Catholic immigrant who came to the United States from the west coast of Ireland (County Galway) when she was a young woman. My mother's life was filled with turmoil and suffering. Leaving the land of her birth, finding limited economic opportunity in her new homeland (she cleaned people's houses and took care of their kids), married to a mentally ill husband (who was institutionalized for most of his life), the constant challenges of raising four kids in poverty, in a tough and sometimes-dangerous neighborhood (South Boston of the '70s and '80s). My mother also had a series of illnesses -- she ultimately died far too young from kidney cancer.

What none of the "facts" above can ever communicate was how funny and hopeful my mother always was. She had a crazy optimism that all of her kids have, and it's something I feel every day. It's the legacy she gave me: one that only deepens with experience.

I remember when I was a boy and she sought an annulment, a kind of church-sanctioned separation, of her marriage. My dad had been institutionalized for a decade, with schizophrenia, and my mother was working hard to take care of him and raise a family, but she also (I suppose) wanted to explore the possibility of having another relationship. A black-clothed old priest would come into our apartment with a black bag filled with black books and plop himself down at our kitchen table and grill my mother like a police detective. He'd try to talk her out of doing what she wanted, to shame her in his way, to make sure she understood that the church wanted her to remain in her marriage (and suffer) no matter what. These conversations sometimes become loud and impassioned. I didn't know what they were about then.

I lost a lot of respect for the Catholic church then (and at other times too), but my mother never lost her faith. "The church" can be controlling and shaming in a way my mother never was. People are invariably better than the "doctrines and dogmas" of any particular faith.

We inhabit a world filled with constant sorrows, yet we have the capacity to find hope and to give hope, to get help and to give help. This is "true Christianity" for me: an active, hopeful engagement with the messiness and suffering of the world. My mom was always engaged in just that way. And yes, it's far from easy -- compassion and caring are the hardest things in life.

Matthew 25 connects me to my mother, my family, and the better angels within me. While Matthew 25 offers me the meaning of Christmas, I also know there are versions of Matthew 25 in all faiths: Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and beyond. The passage envisions "Judgement Day." Here's one translation I like:

“When Jesus comes in his glory . . . All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another.

Then Jesus will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

[Here, "the righteous" explain that they can't recall doing these things for Jesus. They question him about exactly when they "fed" him, when they "invited him in" as a stranger, etc.]

“Jesus replied, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did also for me.’

Now I'm no Biblical scholar, but the clear implication of Matthew 25 is that those who suffer are the equivalent of Jesus. When we see "the least of these brothers and sisters" as somehow less worthy than we are, we are wrong and we risk what happens to those on Jesus's left: he calls them out for wickedness, for caring more about their money, their possessions, their comfort, and themselves and for not caring enough to help "the least of these.". Those who Jesus celebrates fed the hungry, helped the sick, welcomed in the stranger. The others are condemned.

How do we bring the vision of Matthew 25 to life? I suppose it starts with seeing those who suffer as possible versions of ourselves, because they are. We always have a choice: we can walk past those who suffer on the street or in the hallways of our workplaces as if they were inanimate objects in the landscape. It starts with actually opening your eyes and your heart to recognize the suffering around you. It's there, whether you choose to see it or not, no matter how "uncomfortable" it makes you feel. Once you recognize the shared humanity of those in need, maybe you can take the next step of reaching out to offer help.

And yes, empathy is hard, caring is tough, we are all so busy, we have a lot on our to-do lists, we have places to go and people to see. I get it. Priorities. I can't tell you how to live, but maybe you will suffer too, and will want help or benefit from God's grace (which is within all of us and available for us to share). Creating a community where those in need get help can be good for YOU as well as "the least of these" (who can include you, your family, and your friends). When we get help, there's an impulse to give help. There is choice here in what you see and what you do, but don't ever believe there's no day of reckoning, as Matthew 25 envisions. Empathy is a risk, as is compassion, but living in a world without empathy amd compassion is far riskier still. You're either "on your own" or part of a community, and it's up to you to model the world you want.

We live in a world of low expectations for quality, whether in the products we buy, the services we receive, the politicians we elect, or the content we read. We often hear that “quality is so expensive and challenging to produce, and people/customers/readers/users won’t pay more for quality.”

I call bullshit. While this “low quality” vision of the world is pervasive, as is the presence of mediocrity (the people who say, “I don’t care enough to deliver quality; I don’t have enough time to produce quality; I’m not paid enough to offer quality; nobody cares about quality, least of all me, blah, blah), that negative view of quality is exactly wrong about the way the world works.

No matter what marketers say or do, people are not stupid. They know, and always will, the difference between low-quality and high-quality, when somebody cares or not. And guess what? People want quality, even when they have low expectations for quality. They notice, and they tell their friends and family about good and bad experiences.

As someone who produces content in a world best described as “a 24/7 tsunami of low-quality content,” I have only one competitive advantage over the hordes of content writers: I care deeply about quality and seek to do everything I do with quality. Why? Because quality matters a LOT to my clients, to my readers, and, most of all, to my own integrity and growth as a creative person. Quality is the best marketing for writers like me, and their clients/brands too.

Want to lose clients as a content marketer? The fastest way I know is to stop caring about quality, to settle for mediocrity. Zombie content is like dirt in a park -- it’s everywhere and nobody notices it anymore. If YOU create such content, you become an undifferentiated, low-paid commodity who can be replaced by a robot. And the low-quality content you produce makes your client look terrible. As brand messaging goes, it doesn’t get much worse than bad content.

Does the client “save money” by hiring a commodity content creator, someone who takes on so much low-paying content work that they’re like an overworked assembly line worker who crashes at the end of the day? Yes, the client saves money. Here’s what else happens . . . The content creator never improves due to mental and physical exhaustion. Readers of the cheap, “factory-produced” content lose respect for the brand. Is there anything about “low quality content” that’s good? Well, it’s good for me because it offers a business opportunity around high-quality content.

Producing quality content takes time, intelligence, heart, and an optimistic vision of the world. It is a deeply human endeavor. Any creator needs to be smart and rested and well-paid to create consistently high-quality content. I only work with clients who have an understanding of quality and will pay for it. If they don't, they’re better off finding the high-volume, low-quality content drone who will churn out work that customers will ignore.

Quality content need not be prohibitively expensive. People who care the most about producing quality are also (and always) the people who put integrity above making boatloads of money -- they’re not trying to fleece unsuspecting clients, nor will they be fleeced (for they are never unsuspecting people, in my experience). Wherever quality matters, to writers and clients alike, you’ll find that customers matter too. Quality comes out of an ecosystem that puts customers first, not a place of “make it fast and cheap." The best kind of customers, those who care enough to support quality with their money and attention, will always recognize (and appreciate) the difference.

Supporting quality is a virtuous cycle, and it takes a community of writers, clients, and consumers to make that cycle work. We can’t accept a race to the bottom where costs comes first and quality gets tossed out the window. Not in content or in any other aspect of our lives. Whenever a writer asks me for advice, I typically say the same thing: “Whatever you do, do it with the highest quality you can bring, no matter how long it takes or how hard it is. Clients and readers notice, and you'll notice that they notice. Quality should matter most.” What are your views on producing, and paying for, quality?

I don’t watch much news on TV anymore because nothing much on the news is new. We never learn anything we didn’t know a year ago, and we certainly don’t learn anything useful. My wife Darci got up early this morning and turned on the 24-hour cable news channel. She started to get a bit agitated, even talking back to the TV. I must admit that sometimes we both talk back to the TV news at the same time, which is strange when you think about it. I watched for 1 minute this morning, which is about my weekly average for TV news, then had a cup of coffee and headed out to work.

What I saw and heard on the news this morning was what I’ve seen and heard for the last few years -- empty-headed chatter about how unpredictable, unprecedented, and (the word was used constantly) “crazy” HE is (the one whose name shall not be uttered here).

He Doesn’t Matter

I don’t watch the news because he doesn’t matter to me, nor should he matter to you (more on this later). I don’t need an update on “the crazy things he said or did today” or “will he win or lose the new legislative battle over the new odious bill that screws {insert screwee here: the working class, women, immigrants, the poor, the old, the sick, our earth, those who appreciate fairness and decency, etc.]. I don’t need to know “how crazy” he is, or whether he is "winning or losing" the horse race that is Washington politics. The news media is doing us all a disservice when they cover the “he crazy” beat and the “is he winning or losing today?” beat.

His mission is to troll us, to distract us, to scare us, to frustrate us until we can’t think straight anymore. The news media is helping him do that by constantly focusing on the least important things possible: what he says or does. If you wrote a headline every single day for the last two years (and probably for the next two years also) saying “he did/said something crazy again (and not everybody likes it),” you’d be as accurate and as lame-brained as any and all of our mainstream news outlets. They are lost and gas-lighted and hopelessly out of touch with the realities on the ground for real people.

What Does Matter: the News that’s Always News

Poet Ezra Pound once said, in defining poetry, “it’s the news that stays news.” Want to know what news stays news? YOU do. What you do and what you say has more impact in your world than anything covered in the news. You can create change for the good (or for ill) by how you behave. People in power want you to believe you have no power, that you are passive sheep who only watch power-in-action (on TV). They are wrong. Period. The acts of generosity, sharing, kindness, decency, support, gratitude, respect, and (I’d be remiss not to mention) love that you show every single day are what shapes the world around you.

When someone offers up their seat to an elderly person on the subway, that’s not news. When a friend helps another friend who is suffering and needs help (and we are all suffering and we all need help, and fortunately we can all help), that is not news. When we build community with people we care about, when we include others in our personal and work lives because we recognize that all of us are deserving of respect and equal opportunity, that is not news. When we stop to chat with a neighbor or ask a colleague who looks troubled, “hey, how are you doing?”, and care enough to actually listen and talk about it for however long it takes, that isn’t news.

Saying "thank you" and "hello" to strangers isn't news. Inclusion, sharing, teaching, helping isn’t news. Random acts of kindness that model what is best in humanity, which we can perform every single day if we open our eyes to the pain and profound (and even minor) needs of others, is not news.

Yet all of these things change our world for the better. None of this is news you’ll ever see or read about in major “news outlets.” For this reason, and many more (stupidity, irrelevance, coziness with those in power), I don’t watch the news. You are NOT helpless, and never have been. Take action in your own life, develop your own unique capabilities and gifts, then share them with others. Be better, and help others be better, every day. Model good behavior, mentor others, as a way to express what you’d like to see in the world (hopefully, decency, fairness, inclusion, caring, respect, etc.). And get out and vote too.

​Can "he who shall remain nameless" or the news media stop you from modeling behaviors you'd like to see on the news? Of course not, so what is stopping you from engaging in these behaviors today and every day?

If you’re watching the news and it’s making you feel agitated and helpless, turn it off and tune into what’s possible for yourself and those around you. I’m calling this “the new news,” and that’s the news I’d love to see more of every single day.

With the Holidays approaching, we all have a tendency to get stressed out about family, gift buying, New Year's resolutions, and more. I spend more time meditating over the Holidays than any other time of the year. I do it as a way to be fully present with loved ones and reflect upon what's important in my life -- people and not things, memorable experiences and not money. Most of all, I meditate to slow down, perhaps the most important thing any of us can do during the Holidays or at any other time.

As many of my regular readers know, I enjoy researching and writing about the neuroscientific benefits of meditation. Daniel Goleman, author of the 1995 classic "Emotional Intelligence," explains that: "Whenever we get so upset we say or do something we later regret (and who doesn't now and then?), that's a sure sign that our amygdala — the brain's radar for danger, and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response — has hijacked the brain's executive centers in the prefrontal cortex."

While the neuroscience behind the “hijacked” brain is fairly complex, the main idea is that once emotions get triggered, and chemical reactions in the brain and body get unleashed, it becomes difficult to regain our composure and a sense of calm. You can never gain control by moving faster -- you need to do the opposite, in fact.

I tend to be an emotional person, which is great for my creativity but often can be a challenge in my relationships. Slowing down means I'm at my most empathetic and helpful. Meditation has been be a tool for maintaining and restoring calm in my life (my wife Darci meditates daily too, by the way, and we sometimes meditate together).

Meditation Fosters Self-Awareness

Meditation, or at least the Vapassana meditation I do, promotes better self-awareness, which has positive ripple effects on your entire life. The most creative, socially connected people are deeply tuned into their own emotions, using emotions as important information, but not always acting upon emotional impulses. You can choose when to act or when not act upon emotions (and therein freedom resides). Slowing down gives me the power to decide what emotions are worth digging into and which are best left behind. Taking time to observe your emotions from a certain distance is a kind of magic we all have access to, if we chose to develop that magic through meditating.

Self-awareness means having a clear perception of your personality, competencies, strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. It allows me to slow down, stop and think, to better understand myself and other people, and their perceptions of me and mine of them. Once I'm grounded in self-awareness, people's judgments have less sting and influence over me, so meditation fosters my integrity too, allowing me to forgive, change, or seek to "correct" the perceptions of others.

How Meditation Works in the Brain

Research from both Daniel Goleman and meditation expert/Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (they co-wrote a book together) shows the benefits of meditation in building self-awareness. Not only can meditation have impacts on brain functioning, but, according to research by Ricard, meditation “[p]ractitioners also experience beneficial psychological effects: they react faster to stimuli and are less prone to various forms of stress.” They see, listen, and feel.

Meditation can focus attention, helping people develop a clearer sense of what’s happening around (and inside) them from moment to moment. In a fast-moving world filled with complex emotions that can overwhelm (have you watched CNN in the last 2 years?), meditation can be a tool for slowing down and focusing on what’s most important -- which are key relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. So often, we are so stressed that we fail to see others, to hear them, to have compassion for them (or ourselves).

There are multiple types of meditation, but in its simplest form (Vipassana), meditation asks practitioners to focus on their breath. You don’t need to buy expensive equipment or use any technology at all. All you need is a quiet spot and a place to sit down for a few minutes while you close your eyes and give attention to your breathing. I meditate everywhere, even on the subway.

Just keep the focus on your breathing. When thoughts or emotions intervene (“did I send that email?”), you can recognize them, but continue returning the focus to your breathing.

Leigh Stringer, author of “The Healthy Workplace,” likens meditation to a workout for the mind’s muscles. “Instead of trying to do ten things at once, which is normal for many people, meditation requires that we focus on only one thing at a time, and with full concentration -- focusing on our breathing.” To better understand yourself, others, and the world, slow down your mind and focus.

So as the stress mounts this Holiday season, consider taking a meditation break to restore your sense of equanimity. I do it a lot during the Holidays, and it makes me merrier and better able to say "no" to that second glass of high-calorie eggnog. How do you stay calm during the Holidays?

I wrote this essay way back in 2005, at a time when I toiled unhappily in the banking industry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that the rules, compliance requirements, and endless bureaucracy of banking didn't fit the way I like to work. I had a micromanaging boss at the time who neither I nor my colleagues could stand, and most of the staff had already left before I finally quit.

This essay comes from an unhappy place that so many of us have inhabited, working a job that we don't like. I'm not the same person today that I was then, but looking back, I can see how much I've learned and grown since. Anyway, as you'll see, I left that banking job to start working full-time as a writer, something I'm doing (happily) today:

I’m getting tired of the new boss already. Yesterday, a staff member at the bank where I work left an empty paper cup on top of the water cooler. Today there’s a typewritten memo taped to the water cooler announcing that “Used paper cups are henceforth to be discarded in the trash receptacle to the right of the water cooler, not left on top of the water cooler. Your cooperation on this matter is most appreciated." Strangely enough, the new boss chose to highlight every word of this memo in yellow marker, except for his signature at the bottom. Micro-manage much?

I’ve wanted to pull this memo off the water cooler and throw it into the trash receptacle to the right of the water cooler. But I know this gesture would only bring me more trouble. I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to fly below the radar. Maybe I can get used to him, reach some sort of accommodation. I mean, if I impulsively tore off the “paper cup” memo and left it on top of the water cooler, he’d probably just write another memo announcing that memos are not to be pulled off the water cooler, and that we’ll be holding an investigation to ferret out the memo thief.

On Wednesday afternoon last week, he called an after-closing staff meeting, during which he informed us that unnamed staff members have been writing the date on bank documents incorrectly without putting a zero in front of the month and day when that month and day was a single-digit. Some staff members are apparently writing June 6th, as 6/6 instead of 06/06. "Such carelessness will no longer be accepted," he told us, his bald head reddening. We sat there smiling and nodding our heads in agreement, accommodationists all. I just sat there quietly thinking of escaping out the nearest window.

When my lunch break came the following day, I drove over to a small barbeque place that’s my regular hangout. I love the music they play -- it's old and bluesy. And nobody walks around leaving memos. I ordered the pulled pork sandwich and listened to Bob Dylan singing a sardonic song about his girlfriend’s new pillbox hat. I tell Bill the cook that it’s fantastic. He smiles and hands me a CD case. "The whole album is great." he says. "It’s called ‘Blonde on Blonde.’ Go ahead and take it home.” After work, I listen to the album over and over again as I sit at home on the couch thinking about handing in my resignation. Listening to Dylan is like a balm, a way of seeing the wider world rather than being lost in the stupidities of memos and meaningless meetings.

I walk into work the next morning and the new boss has left some inspirational quote on my desk. He has a whole calendar of inspirational quotes, one for each day of the year, and he often photocopies them and leaves them on the desks of lucky staff members. Today’s inspiration is "Don’t give up, just give more." It’s funny, because yesterday’s inspiration was "It’s not enough to do your best: just get it done." I have the impulse to discuss this apparent contradiction with the new boss (do I focus on "doing my best" or "getting the job done"?), but I say nothing and quietly ball up the paper and throw it in the trash. Then I get an inspirational thought of my own – about stealing his calendar of inspirational quotes. It’s getting harder to put up with, the rampant idiocy of the way he manages.​

Some days, I go into the bank and laugh and have fun -- like I don’t have a care in the world. Then the next day I’ll come in and want to scream like the guy on the bridge in that famous surrealist painting by Edvard Munch. Something’s got to give here.

Another day, at lunch, I walk out to the parking lot and sit in my car for thirty minutes listening to Bob Dylan. I keep replaying my favorite song from "Blonde on Blonde" – called Fourth Time Around (click for YouTube), a gorgeous song about a couple that argues, and the man leaves in a huff, and then he comes back because he forgot something, and they argue some more, and they make up in the end, but the hurt is still there lurking between them. It's heartbreaking and funny and beautiful all at once. I sing along quietly for fifteen minutes, trying to match Dylan's lilting cadence. Then I turn the music off and cry for five minutes, a sort of emotional cleansing. I wipe my eyes and then go back to work and sit in my chair and help customers and throw my paper cups in the trash receptacle to the right of the water cooler.

I know that tomorrow I’ll come into work and the new boss will slap my back and eagerly shake my hand and smile that unctuous smile of his and ask me how I’m doing. I’ll say "not bad" and just keep walking. But at some point I’ll realize that I don’t have to keep walking in here. There’ll be no zeroes when I type the date on my letter of resignation, and he’ll just have to live with that. Like Dylan sings, “You go your way and I’ll go mine.” When Friday comes, it'll be time to go mine.

I'm tempted to answer the question above with an obvious, not completely untrue but certainly impartial answer -- that a storyteller simply tells stories. But you need to think of stories as a series of choices made through the filter of the storyteller's experience and craft. Storytellers want to be invisible, to live on only through the story itself, so they are cunning and sly in the way they construct stories.

To steal a dumb phrase from our President's daughter, stories are "architected things," or as I like to tell my clients, "stories are designed objects for a specific purpose to connect with a particular audience." Or if you prefer the Reader's Digest, condensed version: stories are crafted to make people to feel something. When we sit around a campfire at night, we want to be scared. When we're in emotional turmoil, maybe because we've been fired or lost someone we've loved, we want to be soothed and maybe helped with advice.

I ask all my clients, whenever they ask me to write, to tell me WHO the story is for and WHAT the story is intended to do? How do you want the reader of this story to feel and what do you hope they'll do as a result of those feelings?

Humans are different from animals because of our innate impulse to craft meaning from what happens in world. We walk around all day in a narrative fugue state, seeking to fit people, events and data into our ongoing internal narratives. We do this until the moment we die, including as we're sleeping. "What does this mean?" That's the most human question ever, and the reason that storytelling exists. We never stop seeking answers.

Like you, dear reader, I craft stories all day inside my brain. But unlike you, perhaps, I also craft stories for my clients who pay me to do so. And the process begins the same way your storytelling begins, with a profound urge to make meaning from chaos and random events.

When I first meet with a prospective client, I am filled with questions, some of which the client has never considered before. Who is your customer? Why do they reach out and choose YOU rather than your competitor? What keeps your customer's up at night, or, where do they hurt the most? How do you bring change to your customer's life, hopefully in a good way? What do your customers like and dislike about YOU?

All of these questions, and many more, help ME make meaning of the client's business and understand they interact with customers. I demand that my clients view their customer as a human with a problem to be solved, and then ask my client to help me understand how they solve customer problems. If a business isn't solving customer problems, it's not a business for long.

Data and product specifications and software demos are great (I access them constantly in my work), but they don't create emotional responses. Customers make decisions through their emotions first, and then confirm those decisions by marshaling facts and data and "rational arguments" around what they've already decided. "People are rational beings," said no storyteller ever.

Storyteller's go to the pain and the conflict and the uncertainty of human life, because that's where stories live, in the gray and confusing areas that unsettle us. The narratives that I craft, through understanding my client and the customer, through the research I do and the people I interview, through the way I organize the narratives, through every choice I make along the way, are about delivering meaning to people searching desperately for meaning and human connection.

I don't have a template where I insert names and stories just happen. Clients can hire robots to do that, not me. Every story is different; every storyteller is different; every reader is different. We are all simply trying to find meaning in our own ways, and I'm trying to get the reader to trust me and to follow me on the story's journey until I've written my last word.

The events described below occurred in late 2001 and early 2002. This is how I remember those events, though I'm only writing for myself and do not claim to speak for anyone else.

My mother rested in bed at the Brockton, Massachusetts home of my youngest sister, Rose. Mom was tired but wanted to talk with me about coming to America 50 years before. She knew she didn’t have much time or breath left in this world. It was a Tuesday evening in January, and I’d driven here after working at the bank all day. My three sisters -- Rose, Barbara, and Mary -- were here too, and had also come after work to be with our mom.

I should tell you that my mother had recently been diagnosed with kidney cancer, “renal carcinoma” as the doctors described it. I can still recall the shock my three sisters and I felt two months before, after being shown her kidney x-ray in a small conference room at Massachusetts General Hospital. One kidney was completely covered with cancer and the other was mostly covered in it. The young doctor shook her head and spoke carefully to all four of us: “she has stage 4 cancer and no real treatment options left.” My mother was 71 and we sat there in shock as a ticking wall clock was the only sound in the room.

My sister Barbara, the oldest, finally asked what we were all thinking, “how long might she have to live?” Again, the doctor spoke carefully, taking a scalpel to our hearts: “she has about 6 months, in a best case scenario.”

We walked together to my mother’s hospital room, too shocked to say a word. Barbara asked mom if she wanted to get a second opinion, and she said no. Sitting up in bed, my mother told us that she had accepted what was happening and was ready to face whatever God had chosen. We were angry, confused, filled with tears, ready for war, and tried to talk her into fighting, but mom had decided. She told us that she wanted to die with as much dignity as possible, surrounded by her family. And we couldn’t tell her that she didn’t have the right to do that, however devastated we were.

What did we do next? We came together as a family and took care of her. We brought her into our homes. My mother spent the last few months of her life at my youngest sister Rose’s apartment in Brockton. My mother rested, she got weaker, she laughed, she told stories -- and we were there almost every day with her, listening, laughing, and crying.

We have always been a family that laughed hardest when life was at its worst. It seemed that we spent the last few months of my mother’s life laughing non-stop, telling stories, becoming as close as a family as we’d ever been before, and giving my mother (and each other) permission to let go.

My mother wanted to talk, and so did we all. Often, we sat around her bedside in chairs and talked as a family. At other times, we talked to her one-on-one. Of course, my three sisters and I spoke to each other constantly -- about our mother’s failing strength, about the morphine she was taking as she died, about what she meant to us and the legacy she was leaving behind. We decided not to break but to build.

When she and I spoke alone, my mother told me about her childhood in the rural west of Ireland, and her dream (that came true) of coming to America for a better life. She met a wonderful, kind man in New York City, where my mother cleaned houses and took care of other people’s kids, as so many immigrants did then and now. My father worked in the newspaper business and he liked to dance, as did she. They fell in love, married, and started a family. The American Dream.

“Then he changed,” she told me quietly, sadly. “He became another person,” and suffered from a mental illness called paranoid schizophrenia. He’d been a soldier in the U.S. Army, and we often wondered if his mental illness was related to the trauma he’d seen during wartime. One day, when I was a baby, in what would be my first real memory, three men came and took my father out of our house. He never returned to us again.

Years later, I still can’t imagine what something like that might do to a young immigrant wife with children. I know it shaped me as a child, left me lost and confused and angry with the world. I know my mother turned as never before to the solace of her Catholic faith. The absence of my father was the elephant in the room of all our childhoods. My mother didn’t know how to talk about the loss, and (as kids) we didn’t know how to understand or cope with it. We were Irish-American, after all, and suffering in silence seemed to be part of our cultural legacy.

My mother was always a strong person, renowned for her sharp wit and wry sense of humor. She had a way of laughing at herself and others, and did it gently. I suppose it was a way of coping with the pain around her. She gave that gift and that grace to all of us. I remember something the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett once wrote: “I can’t go on; I’ll go on.” That was my mother, enduring and sardonic to the end.

As my mother died, we all told stories, each of us adding our own embroidery, and laughed and prayed and cried. Stories were a refuge, a way of making meaning in times of confusion and loss. For example, we recalled the many cats and parakeets that my mom had taken into our home like members of our family. We remembered coming home from school on more than one occasion to see feathers all over the kitchen floor and the cat hiding behind the fridge. We decided that we’d lost track of the number of devoured parakeets, but we kept hoping for better outcomes between cats and parakeets. We were a family that tried to focus on what was there, not on what was lost – even when what was lost was everywhere around us and in our bones too, defining who we were.

As she lay dying, my mother talked into the wee hours of the night about her heartaches, especially the loss of our father, and we listened with coffee cups sitting on saucers on our laps. She said how exhausting it had been as a single mother working 2 or 3 jobs at a time to support a family in a strange land so far from the green, sheep-filled hills of County Galway. And my sisters and I talked too -- about growing up in the most crime-riddled white neighborhoods in the whole country, the Old Colony Housing projects of South Boston. Unemployment, alcoholism, drugs, and violence were rampant. So was mental illness and PTSD, and we could all relate. Inside our home was bad enough, but outside wasn't exactly the west of Ireland.

We lived near a huge courtyard crowded by dumpsters and incinerators. We also lived within shells, with the drug dealer next door and blocks from serial killer Whitey Bulger, who terrorized South Boston for decades, leaving a couple dozen victims dead (and dismembered). I spent much of my childhood crossing to the other side of the street, staying away from trouble.

After my dad’s illness, my mother never married again, but kept her faith and her sense of humor. It’s ironic that, as an Irish immigrant, she died the day before St. Patrick’s Day. She had mixed feelings about being Irish in South Boston, a bastion of Irish identity. She never liked the color green and had left the country of her birth behind, while second and third generation Irish-Americans in “Southie” told her what it meant to be Irish. In their minds, it was a mixture of fear, resentment, tribalism, and white supremacy. But that wasn’t my mother’s way. She was more Irish than any of them -- in the way she coped, in the way she prayed, in the way she laughed, and in the way she endured the unendurable with good humor and grace.

It seems strange to call those last six months of my mother’s life a gift to our family, but that’s just how it felt to me then (and now). She brought each of us closer to each other, and to her, in those last days. She died the way she wanted to, and with her trademark grace. She shared her stories and we shared ours, in a sort of communal sacrament of farewell.

And then one evening in March she quietly left us, as we stood around her bed and wept and said the “Hail Mary.” I miss her still, especially when I feel the laughter rising up from my belly and feel the urge to keep fighting for others (and myself) because that is what she would have done, what she always did. May she find peace and laughter wherever she's traveling.

After a certain point, writing is largely about following your process. Your particular process and mine may be different, but the only way we find our unique writing voice is through following our process. I've come to my process after some twenty years of writing, and I follow it every time I write for a client.

Writers don't even necessarily need to understand their process, i.e., they don't need to map it out on a whiteboard next to their computer but they need standard ways of approaching work.

I have steps I take in the pre-writing phase, depending on the length of the article. If the piece is shorter, I tend to begin the research as soon as possible and then seek to find the structure of the writing as I go along. Once the research is done, I'll re-read my notes and then start to make a basic structure. For shorter pieces, this structuring process won't take long and can even happen on the back of a napkin. Obviously, you need a beginning, middle, and end, but you need to know the goal of the piece too in order to do it well.

As I research the work, I keep my goal in mind and look for a way to "hook" readers at the beginning. Sometimes the research will reveal an interesting fact or an engaging story or an amazing individual. Whatever is most engaging in the whole story is often the best place to start.

You also need to answer the "why" of what you're doing in the pre-writing phase. Are you seeking to educate the reader, seeking to sell (marketing is selling), or seeking to get the reader to act (advocacy). Your approach will be different in each case. Sometimes the client will tell you outright, sometimes not.